I Grew My Financial Statements Company To $1.5M [Update]

Alexandre Abu-Jamra

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Published: July 13th, 2024

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Alexandre Abu-Jamra

Founder, Klooks

$60K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Klooks

klooks.com.br

from Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil

started March 2012

$60,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Want more updates on Klooks? Check out these stories:

1. Our Business Makes $60K/Month Turning Corporate Financial Statements Into Standardized Data (2023) ➜

This is a follow up story for Klooks. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 1 year ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

My name is Alexandre Abu-Jamra. I'm a Brazilian tech entrepreneur and I run K-Looks. The business is specialized in organizing unstructured financial data, probably the most unstructured type of data around.

Basically we find and turn corporate financial statements (pdf files that are very messy from a structural point of view) into standardized indexed data with "post-OCR" processing.

We go beyond optical character recognition algorithms (OCRs) to solve this problem and deliver accurate, fully customized data solutions (format, chart of accounts, etc.).

That's quite a pain, especially at credit departments of banks, insurance companies and large corporations. Our process is a combination of engines that extracts and categorizes data automatically with human quality assurance. The process delivers data of higher quality than that generated by any highly trained credit analyst with record TAT and scalability. Seamless integration, and multi-language offering: Portuguese, English and Spanish. Give me a month and I can do German as well!

We service some of the main Brazilian financial institutions such as Caixa, Citi and ABC. Also, we are the official data provider to some of the largest global financial data players. Our revenues in 2023 were $1m with triple-digit annual growth in the last 3 years. In 2024 we expect to reach $1.5m in Revenues.

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Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

In 2022 we had USD 600k in revenues, 2023 USD 1m and 2024 we expect to be close to USD 1.5m. I think the most important milestone in the start of 2024 was signing a contract with London Stock Exchange Group. Our business model is built of few large clients, pretty much an enterprise sales business.

Since our last update with Starter Story, we've invested on generating leads inbound and it has been a quite interesting journey. The way we generated leads has always been through our newsletter, now we found a way to organically increase the volume of subscribers in our newsletter. Not having that gear working was breaking out growth.

We've always tried to make ads but never worked. At the end of last year we ran an experiment that worked and in the end it appears to be the hypocenter of our inbound marketing process. It is quite obvious now but it is not so obvious until you make it.

We've started the business long ago so I have a good volume of followers on LinkedIn, which I acquired running our outbound sales process. Now it's around 6k people right in our niche.

I found a replicable and interesting kind of content that helps me sell my service: financial analysis of private companies. A lot of people talk about public co's, but when it gets to private ones I think I am the only one talking about it in Brazil.

I make one content per week and we invest in advertising it. On LinkedIn we do it directly from my personal account but also on Instagram on Klooks' account. Also that content turns into a newsletter content afterwards.

We've noticed that when there is a break on posting frequency lead generating results deeply worsen in all channels. Right now I'm trying to find time to make more (I'm being resistant to outsourcing it 100%, I always want to make "my changes").

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

I think that finding a method to make the wheel turn on inbound marketing was the biggest challenge. Finding a method doesn't mean I'm running that method. Pressing matters usually make it harder to keep content creation discipline. And, as I mentioned, I haven't found a way to totally outsource it.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

Data MVPs can be delivered in a rustic way. They can't be delivered with limited quality.
There is always an upsell in a large client, even if the product doesn't exist yet, it can come to life with a signed contract and 4 months to structure it.
Marketing is a wheel full of obscure, non measurable variables. Sometimes it works, and sometimes the very same thing doesn't work. Maybe it was the way your content was written, the image you used or even the weather. Err on the side of excess. Less apparently is not more.
I was in the middle of a world class catastrophe last month, a flood larger than Katrina's hit my state (Rio Grande do Sul/Brazil) and a land 1.5x the size of England was totally underwater. A data scientist can always help, however in the middle of the frenesi it might take some time to find your place in the sun in a way you can help efficiently.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

We have a legacy system that is not flexible. To grow we need to fix that, that's the only way to automate more routines and to be able to structure new data products.